Giuseppe Di Giovanni

University of Malta, Malta

Giuseppe Di Giovanni received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Chieti, Italy and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, USA. Previously Senior Lecturer of Human Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, University of Palermo, he is currently an Associate Professor of Human Physiology at the Medical School of the University of Malta. He is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer of Neuroscience at the University of Cardiff, UK. His research focuses on understanding the pathophysiology of monoaminergic systems using electrophysiological and neurochemical approach. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, edited 5 books and 4 special issues of various journals. He is the Maltese representative of the Biomedicine and Molecular Biosciences at COST, the intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology in Brussels, Belgium. He also the Head of the Neuroscience Department at the Istituto Euro Mediterraneo di Scienza e Tecnologia (I.E.ME.S.T.), Palermo, Italy.
Over the last fifteen years, I have investigated the functional role of dopamine (DA) and serotonin (5-HT) in normal and pathological conditions in the CNS, including drug addiction, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. To understand the role that DA and 5-HT play in these neuropsychiatric disorders I have used two different experimental approaches: extracellular recording, coupled with microiontophoresis in anesthetized animals and in vivo microdialysis in freely moving rats. Recently, we started to investigate “the role of 5-HT in controlling thalamic excitability and in the pathogenesis of generalised absence epilepsy”. My group is also working on another project to determine “the interaction between 5-HT and DA in nicotine addiction”. Tobacco addiction represents a serious social problem with major impacts on public health, representing the second-leading cause of death in the world.